Though 2025’s Isitifiketi is his first solo album, South African folk singer-songwriter Jabulile Majola actually began his musical career as a rapper. “I always knew I was going to be a musician, but there was a part of my life where I fell in love with rap music on another level,” he tells Apple Music. “People like Zola 7 and Pro Kid were telling stories about where they come from, unfiltered, unpackaged. And I was very drawn to that. I rapped because there was such a hope in how people spoke about the reality as it is. I wanted to be that kind of voice.” Majola’s pivot to folk began in about 2018, a change which followed a journey of exploring his identity. His mother disappeared just days after his birth in Pietermaritzburg, and he spent his formative years in a Christian children’s home before being adopted into a pastor’s family. Raised with both English and Zulu languages and cultures, he later spent six months in England in 2015, before returning to South Africa and learning to play guitar. After lending his voice to a series of dance and electronic collaborations, on Isitifiketi Majola embraces the tradition of storytelling he first discovered at home, rediscovers his love of Zulu and revels in his faith. “I think the word itself has a lot of provenance,” he says of the album’s title. “You will never hear that word anywhere else in the world—isitifiketi. That word is so rhythmic, but it’s also so childlike. In English, it translates to ‘birth certificate’. So this is a sense of a genesis, the beginning of telling my story. These experiences and this way of telling stories, is what informs my imagination. I want to tell a story of hope. The hope that I’m talking about is what anchors you, so that you can go through this whatever you are going through. It’s not this thing of getting to the light at the end of the tunnel. You have the light with you.” Here, Majola breaks down the album, track by track. “Amagugu (Acoustic)” “‘Amagugu’ in English is ‘treasures’. The first part of it is the story of a young shepherd boy, being relayed to a grandfather…consoling him for a terrible thing that has just happened to the shepherd boy. And that terrible thing is something that is unknown. But what brings these two stories together is the chorus. There’s a song that I grew up hearing being sung during funerals: ‘Amagugu alelizwe ayosale emathuneni’. It basically translates to, ‘The treasures of this world will remain in the grave’, or ‘will return back to the grave’. So I’m telling this story of a shepherd boy who’s been lost. The second part of is about a woman who is in an abusive marriage. The theme that holds these things together is the reality that whatever lives that we lead, at some point, it comes to an end. Even in grief, we are united.” “Woza Mntana (Remastered)” “This is the first song that I released as a solo artist, and it’s the song that means the most to me because I feel like it changed a lot in my life. When I wrote the song, I was staring at the face of one of my best friend’s daughters, and I wrote it from that perspective of a father speaking to their daughter. That’s why it sounds like a lullaby. But how I completed it is when I fell in love with a girl that I had known for a long time, a girl that really, we were good friends. We just made sense as friends. At some point, we just decided to be in a relationship, and now we’re married. It made me think of what actually love is about and why certain people don’t believe that they deserve that kind of love. So it’s this fatherly kind of love, the love that wants to take care of you. It’s this intentional love that is constantly giving of itself, constantly self-sacrificing, that I wanted to cover. It’s an invitation for people to actually experience that love because that love is knocking on their door.” “Isineke” (with Thando Zide) “‘Isineke’ translates to ‘patience’. It’s interrogating a situation where a relationship is broken because of distance, because of work, or because of a sense of movement between these two people. It comes to that point where they’re like, ‘You know what? The reason why we’re finding ourselves in this is because we have run out of patience for one another because of the lives we’re living. So let’s go back into patience. Let’s go back to basics.’ Love is gentle and kind, but it’s also patient. I always liked the way Thando Zide approaches things. When she came in, she spoke about it in a very broad way, which took it from two people and spoke about how it actually impacts the whole community.” “uBhubesi” “‘uBhubesi’ is what describes folk music for me, because it’s a song of the community. It’s the story of this young man that left his household or that left the homestead, and went up north. It takes place in the Drakensberg, so he went up north to Johannesburg in order to seek a better opportunity, and just never came back. So he’s a prodigal son to his mother, but then he’s an absent father to his son. I’m singing to the grandmother, basically consoling and saying, ‘Don’t worry, your son will come back at some point. He does miss you.’ His heart longs to come back home. At some point he will return because he realises what he’s missing. He realises what he’s walked out on.” “uJakalasi” “My father had a lot of cattle. We lived on a hill, and then down there there was a marsh. We always would hear jackals—they were one of our fears growing up. ‘uJakalasi’ is a story that takes place in KwaZulu-Natal, and it starts with a community frantically consoling a family that has just lost a daughter who was on her way to school, but the next thing they found her in the bushes, killed. That story covers a lot of the myths or the things that we used to believe when we were kids. We used to be very afraid of red cars because they used to say that red cars with tinted windows, those are the people that kidnap kids. They target kids. And I guess that story just kept on going on and on. ‘Beware of the red cars.’ So the suspect of this whole murder scene is uJakalasi, but uJakalasi has nothing to do with the thing. It’s just that he has the same tyre tracks as the car that kidnapped this child. Then it brings it to the experience of the community, with people saying, ‘These tyre tracks are leading to the city, but we are not able to take a taxi to the city to find out who the perpetrator is, because it’s not yet month end [and we haven’t been paid yet].’ It’s a weird story because on its face, it doesn’t seem like it has hope, but it’s about the togetherness of the people.” “Bamba Isandla Sam’” “‘Bamba Isandla Sam’’ translates to ‘hold my hand’. Sometimes God just provides a stranger for you to cry on, for you to find comfort in for that moment. It’s just this special moment where you can literally feel understood by a stranger. But it doesn’t mean now you go to every stranger and trust them—that’s not what I’m insinuating. But sometimes a stranger is all you need in that moment. They just comfort you in that moment. You don’t do the pursuing. God is the one that provides.” “Uyinkosi Yamakhosi” “This is one of the first worship songs that I sang as a child, at about six. So growing up in a Christian children’s home, there’d be a lot of missionaries coming in, and they would teach us songs. And that was one of the songs that stuck with me. It basically goes, ‘You are the king of kings. You are the creator of this world. All nations exalt, or they are in wonder of, your glory.’ I remember not understanding that. I just liked the words and I liked the song, but I never understood the gravity of the song until recently. When I did a lot of exploring in my faith and I did a lot of growing and a lot of healing, it just made sense.”